Most garage doors consist of panels guided by wheels in rails. A series of panels have rollers on them which ride in the rails. At one end, the rails terminate close to the floor near the door opening. At the other end the rails terminate above the door opening. The panels are guided into position by the rollers and rails to cover the door opening. When the garage door is opened, the rollers and rails guide the panels away from the garage door opening to a position out of the way.
The size of the door opening and the manner in which the roller and rails bring the panels into the closed position have led to special products for sealing between the building structure, or door frame, and the door panel, or panels. These products are comprised of a firm elongated strip having a rectangular cross section and a soft flap extending along the length of the strip. The firm strip is placed on the structure of the building in a position for the soft flap to contact the garage door. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,167,657 and 6,360,489 by Burge, et al., disclose such weather stripping.
Although current products provide an adequate seal between the door frame and the door, they require manual sealing at the external edge of the firm strip and also have cosmetic issues. When the weather strip is installed, a bead of caulking is applied along the edge of the weather strip that faces away from the garage door. This is a manual operation and requires a certain level of skill to apply the caulking effectively and efficiently. Removing this step from the installation process would greatly increase the speed with which the weather stripping could be installed which would result in a substantial labor cost savings.
In addition to the issue of installation, current products present cosmetic issues. The strips are installed with fasteners such as nails and screws. The weather stripping comes in colors to match the doors, or door frames, or both. To prevent the head of the fasteners from being obviously visible against the color of the weather strip, the fasteners must match the color of the weather strip, or the fastener and weather strip must be painted. If the fasteners match the color of the weather strip, fasteners that match the color of weather strip must be kept on hand. Keeping matching fasteners for each possible color of weather strip leads to an inventory problem. Either a large inventory of fasteners must be kept or a mismatch of colors will occur. This is not cosmetically acceptable to end customers. Alternatively, if the weather stripping and fasteners are painted, this is an additional labor and material cost. Frequently, even when a fastener initially has a coating matching the color of the weather strip, it lasts only to the time of installation. For nails, a few strikes of a hammer can remove the coating, and for screws, a slip of the driver can remove the coating. Finally, even if the weather stripping and fasteners match in color initially and the coating survives installation, extended exposure to weather can oxidize fasteners. For strength and cost effectiveness, fasteners typically contain some iron alloy. Extended exposure can change the color of the fasteners and cause them to stand out visually from the weather stripping, or the oxidation may cause streaks to run from the fasteners and cause even more visible discoloration of the weather stripping.